OK, it would probably be best to move this wider discussion away from the Stockhausen thread. There is certain post-1945 music (much of that from composers of the 1950s who engaged with serialism - Boulez, Stockhausen, Barraqué, Pousseur, Goeyvaerts, the earlier Nono - as well as Xenakis, Ligeti, Carter, Ferneyhough to some extent, and others) in which a lot of discussion/appreciation is highly focused upon technical aspects; this is also true of certain music (from Britain, the Scandinavian countries and elsewhere) which makes a lot of colourful orchestration and the like. But there is other music - Lachenmann, Spahlinger, Huber, Globokar, Bussotti, for example, but also Cage, Feldman, Wolff - where aesthetic and/or social issues seem more dominant. And other stuff where the balance lies somewhere in between - Sciarrino, Finnissy, Dillon, Dusapin and others. What I'm wondering is whether this reflects primarily the priorities of those most likely to be drawn to each type of work, or whether it reflects more intrinsic aspects of the music itself? Furthermore, can one really separate out technical and aesthetic concerns?

Both, really (but thanks for making that point, they are of course very different things).

Maybe it depends how one defines 'technical aspects' - is it not possible that compositional decisions could diligently follow an aesthetic agenda, but within that be decided in a relatively intuitive or ad hoc manner? Those are still 'technical', though not so systematic.

That makes me think of a distinct but related question - about whether it really makes sense to judge compositional 'technique' relatively independently of compositional context, as often seems to be done (at least I've regularly come across that sort of view maintained as a bottom line when judging scores for selection and the like)? Schoenberg said that Cage had no feeling for harmony, but the type of application of harmony that Schoenberg preferred (which reflects his aesthetic priorities) maybe is not so relevant to what Cage wanted to do (though I do think Cage did have a certain feeling for harmony in his own particular quirky way). One can talk with a reasonable degree of objectivity about instrumental technique, relatively independently of the means to which it's put, but can the concept really be mapped onto composition as easily as it often is? I'm not sure about this, often in two minds on the question.

I think you're getting pretty close to what I see as being the nub of the matter, Ian. The Schoenberg/Cage example is useful here - of course the types of 'techniques' S used for his harmonic mapping (whether 12-tone or otherwise) were chosen and developed precisely according to his aesthetic conceptions of structure (form/content); and they had virtually nothing to offer to someone like Cage whose perceptions of form/content/structure were virtually diametrically opposed to S's (or quickly became so).
For what it's worth, whenever I have to sit in judgement over someone's score (in a competition or as part of a tutorial) what I'm always acutely aware of is the 'appropriateness' of a chosen technique (or technical 'approach') to the aesthetic intent. In a few cases, the two seem to be exactly one and the same thing (or at least the composer seems to avow as much); but in most it seems to me that there is, inevitably almost, a balance to be struck between the two - or, put a better way, a synergy that can be encouraged between the two.

Certainly - I meant to imply that in the earlier post. What I'm wondering is whether how such commentators speak and write about it to some extent reflects immanent aspects of the music itself - so that some music naturally seems to imply a debate on technique, other music on aesthetics? Or are the decisions of the commentators relatively independent of that?

This is related more to the title than the previous discussion, and I can't find the reference on the web, but I am fairly certain that it was the violinist Tossy Spivakovsky who said that
I've always taken this to mean that a performer should imagine the sound that in their opinion is right for the music, and should play accordingly, rather than doing what is easy.

That's really obvious, but not so easy if it means re-learning an element of instrumental technique, or when you consider that you may form a musical opinion about a piece because of a play through where you subconsciously used the 'wrong' technique.

Anyway, this brings all sorts of things to mind.  Perhaps there are physical limitations that come with certain composition - for example, vibrato on 10ths on the violin is severely limited in variety.  Do composers ever imagine sounds that are not actualy possible to play as they wrote them?

Or when they write a specific technique - perhaps tremolando, how specific do they have to be?  There are so many variations - fast and tight, fast and loose, slower, etc.

Tommo

That's extremely interesting - if this is what he means, I agree with Spivakovsky very much. But there is a further dimension to consider - the opposite end of the spectrum from 'doing what is easy' - having something that's deliberately awkward, though the results are not necessarily particularly ostentatious or the like, so that the awkwardness serves an expressive function. The Ravel Left Hand Concerto is an obvious example; Brahms does this frequently in his piano music, and I've always imagined the Violin Concerto to be similar (would you be able to elaborate on this, tommo?). Also the use of non-idiomatic fingerings - for example the 1-2-1-2-1-2 wrenched arpeggio in the trio of the third movement of Schumann's F# minor Sonata (I may have mentioned this example before) - if you play it with the easier 1-2-3-4/4-3-2-1, it loses that wrenched quality, even though it's more likely to be accurate (if Aaron is reading this, I'm sure he would have some interesting thoughts in the context of his own works employing 'decoupling'). In this sort of case, the sound and the technique can't really be conceived independently of one another, I feel. But that doesn't necessarily contradict what Spivakovsky is saying.

I think many do, sometimes with a certain idealism about performance possibilities, which can in time be shown to be practically possible. Maybe some brilliant violinists might stretch the possibilities of vibrato on 10ths? On the other hand, there is a line to be drawn between that which stretches the instrument/instrumentalist, and that which is simply impractical and always will be - some things are ambiguous in this respect, but some are relatively clear-cut. Between the 'not-yet-possible' and the 'never-possible', I suppose.

This is something I've often asked young composers when doing workshops, about all sorts of aspects. If a tremolo is left relatively open, are they happy with various performers playing it in their own 'default' manner (which may vary significantly)? Same with a trill, or rhythmic things (there are many ways simply to execute a triplet, depending on context, and each performer will interpret them differently). I would say it's not so much a matter of a composer clearly specifying 'what they want' (which can be almost impossible to delineate totally unambiguously) but rather using notation that eliminates the possibility of misinterpretation, producing what they definitely 'don't want'.

This sort of question always crosses my mind when I see scores with 'as fast as possible' and the like written in - what constitutes 'possible'? 'Possible' in the sense of playing with 100% accuracy? And if there's some margin for minor error allowed, how much? Is one to ease the tempo into the realms of what seems 'possible', or push it further into the 'only maybe possible'? If you know Finnissy's Snowdrift, there are various long streams of high grace-notes in that (not unlike those at the end of Stockhausen's Klavierstück IX, which was a likely influence, though significantly more extended). He once told me to literally rush these so that they weren't so easily fluent, speeding up where they are closer together so one had to slow a little with wider contours. The same situation applies with Sciarrino's Third Sonata. This is very hard to raise with students doing competitions, though, where any such risk-taking is sure to have them instantly marked-down or eliminated, so they want the safe option of easing the tempo in the manner you describe - have you found this to be the case?

Well, I'm not sure if there is a 'right' performance, but there can be numerous types of 'wrong' ones. Being 'least wrong' is a reasonable way of defining the boundaries within which one has freedom.